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George Carlin Didn’t Shun School That Ejected Him

George Carlin, who died on Sunday at age 71, is not the most famous graduate of Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. That honor would probably go to either Martin Scorsese or Regis Philbin.

But Mr. Carlin is without doubt the most famous Hayesman who never graduated.

And 25 years ago, the acerbic comic and well-known atheist took part in a fund-raising dinner to honor the priest who actually suggested to young Mr. Carlin that he might want to go to another school. As he himself noted in his 10-minute riff on the school, you always knew trouble awaited when the priests started calling you “Mister.”

Mr. Carlin arrived at Hayes in the early 1950s, part of the class of 1955. But after three semesters, he left the school, involuntarily, and enrolled — briefly, too — at Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem. Over the years, he would drop references to Hayes, whose colors are the cardinal and gold (in one talk show appearance he went on about how the colors looked suspiciously like red and yellow).

Such references would routinely make alumni (including this writer, class of 1975) shout, “He’s talking about Hayes!” as any weary spouse can attest. A tape of his 1983 appearance at the fund-raiser was shared among classmates like underground comedy, and it was introduced to a new generation last year when the school used it for a fund-raising video. In it he talks about how Hayes was “the coolest school” around.

The 1983 fund-raiser was the school’s first Hall of Fame dinner-dance, and it was to honor Msgr. Stanislaus P. Jablonski, a legendary dean of discipline who was better known as Jabbo, the Mean Dean and the Sinister Minister. That Carlin would be chosen to honor the man who kicked him out of a school that preached a religion he no longer believed in did not go off without problems. Some in the alumni association feared it would send the wrong message, said Neil Sullivan, an association member at the time.

“Some of us said Jesus hung out with sinners,” Mr. Sullivan recalled. “That won out. Maybe this was a road back for him.”

The comic jumped at the chance to honor Monsignor Jablonski, who had remained close to the Carlin family, Mr. Sullivan said. And unlike some other past honorees, Mr. Carlin paid his own way and asked for only one thing — a Hayes baseball jacket.

The 1983 dinner was held not at Hayes’s then-dicey South Bronx location, but at the archrival Mount St. Michael Academy in the northern Bronx.

“What are we doing at the Mount without the football team?” he started, and off he went. The rest of the routine had spot-on impersonations of teachers and deans of his era, and wry takes on how Irish Catholic teenagers coped with life at the button-down, disciplined school on the Grand Concourse. He captured the hilarity of teenage wiseguys dreaming up outlandish hypotheticals in religion class as they tried to stump the priest about what is or isn’t a sin. Short version: When they trust you enough, sometimes, in some cases, it’s not a sin.

“Anybody who went to Catholic school at that time knew somebody like Jabbo,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And for Carlin to do that routine, a one-shot routine, he had to have spent countless hours preparing.”

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The routine was clean, much to the relief of nervous administrators at the time. He knew he had made his fame with routines like the “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and though his old classmates tried to get him to utter them, he refused. “Hey Carlin, you going to do the seven words?” he mimicked them in his routine. “It’s O.K. The priests are liberal!”

His reply, a barnyard epithet, was the only vulgarity of the night. Monsignor Jablonski, by the way, seemed to have enjoyed the tribute. At one point the monsignor, a lifelong New Yorker who died in 2002 at age 86, read from what he said were old detention slips he had issued to a young George Carlin. One of them seemed prescient: “He thinks he’s a comedian.”

Carlin’s mini-performance that night never did become the road back alumni had hoped for. Joe Valenti, the school’s development director in the 1990s, managed to get to see him backstage after a show at the Westbury Music Fair. The comedian was generous with his time, but not his money.

“But he was a total gentleman,” Mr. Valenti said. “By then he had changed, and maybe he wanted to spare the school embarrassment.”

Hayesmen continued to claim him as one of their own — besides, his brother, Patrick, did graduate from the school. And there were tales that he would still return to the school every now and then.

“He would come up to the front of the school and he would walk back and forth,” Mr. Sullivan remembered hearing. “Apparently he went back there to get his thoughts. It brought him back to a certain time.”

And that jacket he got from the school 25 years ago? Mr. Sullivan said a former classmate who remained friends with Mr. Carlin always spotted it in the comic’s dressing room.

“Even though there was kind of a divorce from the church, his friend brought him Hayes shirts,” Mr. Sullivan said. “And he still had the jacket.”

Correction: June 26, 2008

An article in some editions on Tuesday about the time that the comedian George Carlin, who died on Sunday, spent at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx included an erroneous year from school officials for the graduating class he entered with (he did not graduate from Hayes, however). It was 1955, not 1954.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B3 of the New York edition with the headline: Geroge Carlin Didn’t Shun School That Ejected Him. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe